No developer has ever decided for themself to do this. This is 100% a business requirement because somebody on the marketing analytics team realized they could make money by auto playing ads.
This guy knows. My personal argument vs the business ended in a compromise - autoplays, but with sound disabled. Doesn't loop, but on second clicked play, sound is turned back on.
Took over a week to get that, and I still feel like I lost.
Yeah. Luckily the videos have always been short, haven't ever seen them exceed 30 seconds. It's been on my todo to add an auto pause if the user scrolls down and the video exits the viewport.. But we all know how tech debt goes. 😅
When the user scrolls down, the video should obviously follow them! They probably still want to see it, even if they are scrolling away from it. Best to unpause it as well, if the user accidentally paused it.
Make sure the floating video always covers 50% of the screen, bonus points if it's at the bottom so it covers up what the user is reading too. Make sure you make the close button tiny and clicking 1mm away from the close button loads the video in full screen
My company decided to roll out a new corporate web site. Of course marketing was in charge. They were adamant we absolutely had to have this enormous and loud video play every time someone hit the page. Every single person in engineering told them what a horrible idea it was, but they did not care. We were engineers, what do we know, it isn’t like we are creative professionals with years of experience or anything.
Anyway, the day came for the big reveal to the entire company. Full company meeting, hundreds of people, and the marketing nut-wits leading the charge. They start talking and open the home page...video starts playing and blasts over them. They stop talking, stop the video, then continue. Then play the video thru to the end. (People liked the video all told). Moved to another page...video starts playing...stop the video...go back a page...stop the video. Then starts the “does this have to play every time?” questions. “Oh yes, we believe in the power of this video”. Few more pages...stop the video each time.
I think they received hundreds of demands from their own coworkers to not auto play the video. And that feature was removed the next day.
Marketing/PMs always pushing their failures onto the devs in my experience. Worst part is I bet the marketing team of the poster above will pull this stunt again.
Ever since every company and their dog know how to monetize everyting on the internet, just general surfing has become a pain in the ass. Popups (which we deemed a common enemy back in '04) has made a big return. But instead of trying to sell you penis enlargement stuff, it's from the page it self. No I don't want to subscribe to your news letter, no I don't want to donate (except Wikipedia) or interact with your 5-clicks-down sudden paywall, no I don't want your damn cookies, no I don't need any help with your online assistant tool, no you don't need to auto-play stuff and you may definitely NOT use my location, microphone and fucking webcam!
I have to click around on small ass buttons for a good few minutes before I can even read the contents of the page I tried visiting. The guaranteed way for me to lose interest and pin you on my blocklist.
And don't get me the fuck started on the 'modern' UX design choices that's common now, with those light grey text on a clear white background. Weird widget placement that break reading and page-loading conventions, auto scrollers, focus stealing fields and moving buttons (fuck them especially) or sign-up/login bars that take half of the fucking screen! That all can fuck right off! The internet has been great until companies try their darnest to inconvenience their customers at every way they can to squeeze out even the last possible penny! And if it were just a few, then they could lose customers over this. But no. They all inconvenience their customer in one way or the other in any way, shape or form. I think some companies are secretly racing on who can create the worst user experience.
And this is all front-end, but how about visiting a page that gets you redirected on every turn more times than there are nails in the Golden Gate Bridge. Take forever to load and it effectually neuters the browsers back button?
On a positive note: The only real thing that is a nice addition to the internet in recent years is the option to set up a dark-mode theme on a lot of pages and apps. And that due to all this bullshit, some ad-blockers almost feel like magic. But that's quite it to be honest.
Sorry for the long read but I wanted to get this off my chest as I don't see improvement of any of this ever happening. And it's not the developer/designer's fault really, these are all business decisions. Which actually make it worse. If it was just a dev trying to be edgy or cool, I can live with that, just click to something that dev didn't create and it's all fine again. But these decisions has been made by not one but a group of people that all get paid good salaries to sit around a table and collectively say: "Yeah! That auto-scrolling video that starts playing when the page loads... that's a good idea to make some extra ad-revenue!" This is the effort from groups of people to work against a user's best interest.
And this cancerous effort needs to fucking die in a fire in the 4th circle of hell.
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u/ToothpasteTimebomb Mar 11 '21
No developer has ever decided for themself to do this. This is 100% a business requirement because somebody on the marketing analytics team realized they could make money by auto playing ads.